Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

Normally, feminists and the liberal broadsheets baulk at attempts to use the politics of fear to make women behave more "responsibly". If anyone says that abortion is bad for women's mental health or that youthful sex increases the likelihood of contracting cervical cancer later in life, these guardians of the ideal of female choice will demand "where's your evidence?" and will slam The Man for trying to panic women into being meeker and more demure.

That's all changed in response to the story of the "exploding" French breast implants. Now, the sisterhood and the liberal press are at the forefront of spreading panic about women's allegedly reckless choices and behaviour, because they relish the opportunity to tell a certain kind of woman – the non-feminist, non-Guardian-reading, fake-fingernailed, big-boobed inhabitants of places like Essex (eurgh) – to change their ways "or else".

The reason feminists are happy to ignore the evidence in this instance, and to use the politics of fear to try to convince women that breast augmentation is mad and bad, is because their sisterly solidarity dries up when confronted by Those Women – by sassy, body-conscious women who like to have big breasts, tanned skin and fun, who wilfully refuse to bow and scrape before the feminist diktat about how it's better to be natural than cosmetically enhanced. Modern feminism is riddled with snobbery, with its leading lights frequently looking with horror upon the vile, vajazzled hordes, with their orange skin and high heels, in a manner not dissimilar to how Victorian anthropologists once gawped in shock at weird African tribes.

Feminists rationalise their disdain for free choice in this area of women's lives, in relation to cosmetic enhancement, by arguing that actually these women, being a bit thick and all, haven't really made a rational choice. No, they have apparently been duped by "the culture" into believing that they must have really big breasts or otherwise society will shun them. So in her book "How To Be A Middle-Class, Time-Rich, Glasto-Loving Woman" (at least I think that's what it's called), Caitlin Moran says such women have been "pornified", their fragile little brains invaded and warped by "porn culture" to such an extent that they end up believing, robotically, that they must pluck and preen themselves all day long. Laurie Penny points the finger of blame at a "culture that makes women feel like little more than pieces of meat". Of course, the well-brought-up, well-educated women who make up the modern feminist lobby are capable of resisting this "culture" – it's only the other women, Them, the dolly birds, who are apparently warped and threatened by it. Therefore it is incumbent upon the better class of women to panic these Stepford-style desirers of large breasts out of their daftness and stupor.

What these feminists don't seem to appreciate is how eerily their disdain for cosmetic surgery echoes the arguments of the old misogynistic moralists of the long-gone priestly class. Just as those moralists used evidence-lite claims to try to pressure women to conform to the role designated for them by nature (for example, women who refused to have children were said to be more prone to wrinkles), so today's feminists try to panic women into accepting their natural bodies by telling them their breasts will fall off if they interfere with what nature gave them. In shunning the demand to "stay natural" and ignoring the frequent unhinged scares about the dangers of breast implants, "Essex birds" reveal that they are way more radical than today's cliquish and pious feminists.